Conversational marketing describes an approach to increasing customer engagement, building brand loyalty, and positively impacting sales results.
Conversational marketing is enabling marketing teams to achieve their desire to have personalized conversations with their customers at scale. Thanks to this, brands can learn what matters to their audience and build ongoing relationships that help them better serve their customers.
These developments are happening due to two trends: the rise of mobile usage is now happening within popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. And businesses are looking for the best way to get to know their customers within these apps.
At the same time, advances in technology are opening the doors for businesses to converse with their customers on a large scale and, in doing so, learn about their needs and preferences without intrusively monitoring their online behavior.
How can conversational marketing help my business?
Personalized, one-on-one conversations have the power to build customer relationships, increase loyalty, and deliver great consumer experiences. Brands can use conversational marketing to open a two-way communications channel with their customers.
Marketers can use this deep customer understanding to drive business results.
Companies now operate in a sales environment that no longer dictates when, where, or how customers engage with them. With real-time messaging, buyers expect a new type of experience, where conversations happen on their own terms.
Additionally, marketing teams have spent the better part of the last decade targeting key customers through content marketing, rather than shifting their focus to what clearly needs to be addressed.
The buyer’s journey and sales funnel have changed. For years, sales and marketing teams have focused on using the “form and follow” approach to capture and qualify leads. We’re all familiar with the steps below…
Step 1: Attract people to your website
Step 2: Have those people fill out the capture forms
Step 3: Send messages by email, call or enter them into a sales pipeline
While steps 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward and usually get most of the attention, step 2 is the problem.
Capture forms have become annoying, cumbersome and seemingly outdated for shoppers. This may have something to do with the increased usage and higher comfort levels in using messaging apps.
By implementing a conversational approach, a single marketer can now set up a bot that automatically greets hundreds or thousands of visitors and asks them qualified questions.
That bot can send qualified leads to specific sales reps or help prospects place demos on a rep's calendar.
This new 'fast lane' saves time for both the buyer and the sales rep. The buyer receives real-time interaction, and the sales rep spends less time filtering out bad opportunities.
Create a more human shopping experience
Bots aren't replacing person-to-person conversations. They're simply enabling the right conversation to happen with the right people (or bot) at the right time.
As strange as it may seem, bots actually allow marketing and sales to have a more human interaction with potential buyers.
Why use conversational marketing?
Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
A conversation is, at a minimum, a two-way exchange of information: someone speaks, and someone listens and responds. Your response is heard and responded to, and you do the same, and so on, until the conversation is concluded.
Think about traditional marketing media. In print, you deliver an advertisement to your readers, who read it and decide whether or not to contact you.
Measurement is difficult and there is no way to dynamically change the message based on audience response.
In other words, traditional media marketing is not a conversation. Information is delivered, but there is no observation and response cycle. You cannot quickly adapt to your audience's needs, desires, or approval/disapproval from your initial message.
Now consider Internet marketing. You deliver a message to your audience through a conversational network, a message that reaches your audience. People see your message and you know they see it because you can measure “views.”
Then, they either take or don't take the action you want them to take (buy, join, contact, register, etc.), and you know that too, because you can measure that too.
And you can do all of this anonymously, at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. Most importantly, you can do all of this in real time. So, you can modify your conversation, your resources, or your messages after days, hours, or even minutes of starting a campaign. You deliver a message. Your audience responds. You watch and adjust your message accordingly.
WhatsApp is the first mass marketing medium where this level of two-way interaction can occur in a polite and empirically measurable way.
